For all their bolshy swagger, The Stone Roses were an unlikely alignment of the planets: Ian Brown, a singer flatter than a Dutch motorway; John Squire, a guitarist bordering on jazz-funk, plus Alan “Reni” Wren and Gary “Mani” Mounfield, an engine room which could have started an industrial revolution.

When they shambled to a close in 1996, they left us one of the great British pop debuts. Oh, and its successor, one of the great British pop disappointments.

The inevitable re-formation came last year, seemingly to the relief of a generation. Yet for all the success of their northern dates last June, Friday’s show failed to sell out and was bedevilled by a hushed sound, Brown’s limitations and the collective on-stage taciturnity.

Misguidedly, they refused to play anything new, in favour of becoming a nostalgia act to which people could party like it was 1989. Alas, this scanty back catalogue means they are not just short of classic songs but actual songs. Even those wearing Stone Roses-tinted glasses saw why Elephant Stone and Going Down had not been aired since 1990, while Fools Gold was extended beyond human endurance into nincompoopish noodling.

Yet the band who might have become Oasis did not alter the course of British music by fluke. Brown could bathe in his own charisma; and when he knuckled down to the jet-propelled She Bangs The Drums and Don’t Stop, Squire was other-worldly and the engine room remains peerless.

So for every misguided moment there was another of wonder, mostly towards the end. Their best song, Made Of Stone, tumbled through its magical chorus with stomach-tightening power; Elizabeth My Dear’s brief beauty remains undimmed and the laser-lit closer I Am The Resurrection was all the evidence anyone might need as to the greatness as well as the importance of The Stone Roses.